Black Omega - The Audiophile Player for your Audio-files.

In the beginning before the Big Bang Kilonova Hypothesis there was Black Omega. Perfected over 25 years, Black Omega is an open-source music player designed for audiophiles rendering your audio-files with bit perfect accuracy. Employing low level audio APIs and custom codecs Black Omega utilities the capabilities of your premium high-end DAC delivering pure seamless playback of your music collection.

Download Black Omega For Windows Download Black Omega For MacOS

Got a multi-channel 5.1 audio file you want to play through your attached A/V surround amplifier then Black Omega is for you. Supporting multi speaker configurations from mono, stereo, quadraphonic up to full 7.1 surround systems Black Omega is able to fully utilise your beloved setup to the maximum. Employing the dedicated left and right speakers Black Omega extends the stereo sound stage to all speakers; including a dedicated LFE channel for your subwoofer.

Capable of playback of up to 768kHz and 32-bit depth, Black Omega is designed to support the playback of any modern High Resolution soundtrack on your high-end DAC at the track’s recorded frequency and bit-depth; bit perfect and seamless. With over 25 years of development history Black Omega provides:

  • Playback of up to 768kHz and 32-bit depth.
  • Pure integer mode for lossless formats.
  • 64-bit double floating point precision for lossy codecs.
  • Custom MP3, MP4-AAC and Vorbis Ogg lossy codecs tuned to 64-bit perfection.
  • Custom WAV, FLAC, ALAC and AIFF lossless codecs.
  • Supports for musepack and wavpack codecs.
  • Supports up to 7.1 surround sound audio files and systems.
  • Playback via Steinberg’s ASIO or Microsoft’s WasAPI on Windows.
  • Exclusive Integer playback via MacOS’s HAL layer.
  • Playback via ALSA layer on Linux.
  • Seamless track transition.
  • Smart selection of DAC mode.
  • Intuitive and simple to use interface.

Black Omega is a free to use and modify open source player released under the BSD-3-Clause license. The source code is available on Github.

Pure Integer Mode

Lossless codecs, such as WAV, FLAC, ALAC and AIFF, encode their PCM audio data in integer format. Coupled to this audio data is rendered to the DAC hardware as integer samples. In contrast, lossy codecs, such as MP3, MP4 and Vorbis, encode their PCM samples as floating point numbers. Pure integer mode reads integer encoded samples from lossless codecs and directly renders this to the DAC hardware thus guaranteeing the purity of bit perfect playback at the correct bit resolution.

Smart Matching of DAC Mode

Every DAC has different capabilities; supported playback frequencies, bit depths and number of output channels. In turn every audio file has its own playback frequency, bit depth and number of audio channels. Ideally, the DAC should be setup to play at the frequency and bit depth of a given audio file. e.g. A 16-bit track at 44.1kHz should be rendered to the DAC as 16-bit audio data at 44.1kHz. As opposed to 24-bits, as this would require an upscaling operation on the original data. Then say what happens if you have a high resolution track with a playback frequency of 192kHz but the DAC is only capable of playback at rates of 44.1kHz and 48kHz?

Black Omega’s smart matching algorithm addresses this problem. By knowing the hardware DAC’s capabilities the most appropriate playback mode is used for each given audio track. Then, if required, our high quality resample filter adjusts the playback frequency to match the DACs playback frequency. Ultimately Black Omega is designed to playback any audio file no matter the DACs limitations, even if it is a 1-bit DAC capable of only 8kHz.

Extended Stereo on 7.1 Surround Sound

Utilise all your speakers, wither via HDMI connector to an A/V Surround Amplifier or via a 7.1 sound card, Black Omega extends the stereo sound stage. Firstly the left channel is sent to the assigned left speakers and the right channel to the assigned right speakers. Secondly an addition centre channel is mixed from the left and right to be rendered to the assigned centre speaker. Then a dedicated LFE channel is rendered, using low-bandpass filters, that is played through the subwoofer.

Personally, this is my favourite mode, in combinations with my A/V Amplifier’s Dirac filter produces a stereo sound stage that is holographic and full of life.

Own the Bragging Rights

It has been a personal observation that self-described audiophiles like to brag about the engineering and heritage of their chosen equipment. Turntables made by former NASA aerospace engineers is one example. Or some name their products after famous physicists like Dirac.

As the author of Black Omega I am also the progenitor of the Big Bang Kilonova Hypothesis.

In my hypothesis I propose using a binary neutron star merger as the causal mechanism of the Big Bang for self-similar patterns repeat irrespective of scale. Given that the large scale anisotropies of the microwave sky, as seen by both NASA’s WMAP and ESA’s Planck missions, shows the signature of a kilonova explosion I present my scientific case for how they came to be. In doing so I answer the question of how we came to live in a mostly homogenous and isotropic flat universe.

So if you want your music player to be designed and built by the very best physicist then Black Omega is the player for you. And as the progenitor of Big Bang Kilonova Hypothesis I need Black Omega in order to retain some sense of grounded sanity. I mean did you ever hear the tale of the Philosopher’s Stone?

Custom Codecs

Black Omega started life as an MPEG Layer-3 decoder back in 1998. Since then it has expanded to include our own MP4, Vorbis Ogg, WAV, FLAC, AIFF and ALAC decoder implementations. As such every detail in the audio decoding and playback pipeline has been obsessively engineered to ensure purity and perfection.

For instance, at the heart of the MP3, MP4 and Vorbis Ogg decoders, are DSP filter banks known as Modified Discrete Cosine Transforms (MDCT). I spent many years trying many variations, as well as reading many papers and books on how best to calculate the MDCT ensuring both numerical stability coupled with numerical optimisation.

It is with this attention to detail that makes Black Omega an audiophile player for your audio files.

History

Black Omega began as an MP3 player, back in 1998, where I developed my initial MPEG Layer-3 decoder from the Fraunhofer IIS source code. MP3 was a revolutionary format allowing us to share their songs across the old dialup internet. For me the beauty lay in the science of psychoacoustics as it crossed the fields of mathematics and neurophysiology giving insight and deeper understanding of how we not only hear music but process it as well. The first version of Black Omega, using the Windows multimedia library, played the decode mp3. Having done one decoder I then went on to do another with the newer open source Vorbis Ogg format.

Usually playback of audio on a desktop PC is shared between multiple applications. One extreme restriction of this is that all audio must be rendered at a fixed frequency, usually 44.1kHz or 48kHz. Another is the quality of the sound mixer of the OS and back in the early 2000’s, on Windows, this was pretty dire. So the need for the second major version of Black Omega was born.

Using Steinberg’s ASIO API Black Omega is able to get exclusive control of a DAC and talk to it in its native format and frequency. Using Qt, a cross-platform toolkit, I created a MacOS version of Black Omega using the CoreAudio library at first and then later the direct integer playback via MacOS’s HAL (Hardware Audio Layer) API.

The list of supported codecs increased creating custom MPEG-4 AAC, FLAC, Apple Lossless, WAV and AIFF decoders. Also integration of the musepack and wavpack audio codecs was added. Microsoft in the meantime had developed the WasAPI, as a replacement for ASIO so I added support to fully utilities this new audio API.

I had started the creation of the pure integer mode functionality, back in 2014, as it was a necessary precursor to working on full DSD support. It was at this point I had a bit of career change, having been let go, and worked with Daniel who founded HiFiBerry developing their Linux kernel drivers. Though after a year, we parted ways, as I began digging into a “certain physics idea”.

Eight years later I am now the progenitor of the Big Bang Kilonova Hypothesis.

Having answered the major questions in cosmology like

  • Why is the universe homogeneous and isotropic?
  • Why is the universe flat?
  • Where do supermassive black holes come from?

to name but a few I needed to come back to some sort of normality. Finishing what I had started I have completed the pure integer mode functionality alongside many improvements and bug fixes to WasAPI playback.

Looking to the future I can finally implement functionality for DSD playback.